Into the Woods
by olgatheodora
Summary: Snow on corpses. A New Caprica AU.
1. And Home Before Dark

AN: An AU fic written during the hiatus between season two and season three.

A big thank you to kimbari, who pointed me toward the site where I found my prompt ("snow on corpses," for the curious), and to deepforestowl and ghoulsis, who both performed last minute betas. Thank you both! I'm so grateful!

Also, a nod of thanks to the musical "Into the Woods," for inspiring my title, and to Robert Frost.

***

When Laura thought about her childhood, she remembered shelling peas and porch swings and winter mornings bundled under thick quilts. The snow of her childhood had been friendly: cold, certainly, but not a life-threatening entity that buried water sources and blocked the simplest of time-worn trails, isolating nearly every family in the community. She had built snowmen with her sisters and hurled densely packed snowballs at the neighbor boys, giggling as they retaliated with more force but less skill.

Winter on New Caprica was a frightful ordeal, and by the time the longest night of the year rolled around the human population had been greatly diminished. The ground was frozen solid, making burial impossible, and fuel was too precious to waste on cremation. At first an effort had been made to take the bodies to a spot separate from the camp, but as time wore on, that became not only impractical, but also dangerous. When clean-up detail began permanently disappearing, due to sudden storms or patches of snow only deceptively shallow… well, it was natural that such duties became neglected.

Still, Laura couldn't help but think that come spring, they were going to have an awful mess on their hands. She knew that if she were to go twelve paces in any direction from her door (if the entrance to her lean-to could be dignified with such a description), she would likely stumble upon at least two buried corpses. The buried ones were the worst, in some ways: she could never really get over the spine-chilling feeling of bumping her leg into what was obviously an arm, or- even worse- accidentally stepping on a leg, losing her balance, and becoming more intimately acquainted with the still body than she had any desire to be.

This was not to say that the fresher corpses were any less upsetting, but somehow the image of snow dusting over formerly alive features had become less disturbing than never knowing when she might take a tumble and find herself sprawled atop a fleet member she had been acquainted with, or the sixth grader she had last seen leaving the school room with a cheerful wave.

It was right at one of those instances, when she was instinctively throwing herself as far away from the corpse as possible, that she wished desperately for Bill. This was hardly the only time she found herself hoping for this miracle, but it was when the wish became most fervent: to rewind time a few years and break some pencils. She would live the election over and over in loop if it meant getting off the planet.

She thought it a pity that her wish stood such a little chance of coming true.

Laura occasionally wondered how the rest of the settlement dealt with these unexpected surprises when venturing outside of their drafty abodes. A few, she had seen in action: Maya tiptoed cautiously, a look of unadulterated fear on her face; Cottle eased his way through the deeper sections, coughing all the while; Starbuck tramped without mercy, barely seeming to notice a hand anymore than she might notice a branch. She had certainly become a different woman after Anders had died, in more than one way: cautious in her actions, but reckless in demeanor and- if Laura wasn't mistaken- rounded in form. Laura didn't think Starbuck would appreciate any comments regarding her apparent pregnancy, given that Starbuck didn't seem to appreciate any kind of verbal communication these days.

But then, who did? Their lot was now only to do and die.

The news had come straight from the mouth of Six herself, although which Six it was Laura couldn't quite determine. They all seemed to swarm around Baltar like elegantly manicured bees (their immaculate hygiene was truly a wonder of the universe), and if they had distinctive personality traits, they took care not to show them around Laura.

"We're leaving," Six informed her plainly, casually tossing a stack of papers into a nearby stove.

"Is that so?" Laura glanced over at Baltar, noting his tense posture and the roughly darned holes in his sweater.

Another Six answered her, straightening Baltar's collar with a gentle twitch. "Our work appears to be done. Your population has decreased dramatically-"

"-the bodies of your dead tossed without care into snow drifts-" another continued, picking the thread of conversation up smoothly and passing it to yet another clone.

"-your civilization has proven itself to be savage and far removed from self-sustaining." This third Six sank elegantly to the floor, and crossed her long legs. "Your fleet has disappeared with barely a skeleton crew. Your women produce living children only one birth in four, and of those children only two of three have any chance of reaching adulthood."

Laura had long known these facts to be true, had tried desperately to remedy what she could and forget what she couldn't, but spoken so plainly she heard the intended message as what it was: a death sentence. As wretched as the Cylon occupation was, it was generally to be endured by the spirit, not the flesh: without the aid that they did supply in plenty, the human race would quickly die out.

Laura recognized the irony.

"It wasn't my understanding that you gave up quite so easily," she replied after a moment of thought, her knuckles white with tension. "When nuclear holocaust wiped out the majority of the population, you pursued us into space. When you finally cornered us, you professed only an urge to care for and protect your creators." She met Baltar's gaze momentarily. "Am I to understand that you have finally been beaten by the weather?"

"No," a Six said simply. "Rather, you have." She offered her hand. "We wish you luck, Laura Roslin."

Laura couldn't bring herself to accept the offered gesture, nor could she bring herself to speak without saying something regretful.

After a moment, Six withdrew her hand in calm acceptance. "In recognition of his efforts for our cause, we will be taking President Baltar with us."

Laura considered this to be the only blessing of the entire situation, and knew that she would much rather die here on this accursed planet than take his place. From the look on his face, Baltar agreed, and a small part of her gleefully cherished that tidbit of information.

"And as he will no longer be able to fulfill his elected duty," another Six continued, "we congratulate you on regaining your former office." They leveled an unblinking stare. "May you have great joy of it."

It seemed to be Laura's fate to have charge of this nearly extinct race until the end. After she died, she fully intended to track down whatever gods had been in charge of that decision, and deliver a truly scathing lecture.

Now, it was snowing outside, and Laura's blankets were not sufficient for the current temperature, nor was her roof prepared to shelter her from another heavy snowfall. She secretly hoped that when the damn thing finally gave way, the gods would be merciful and knock her unconscious with one swift blow from the timber.

Until then, she would wait- not for help, because the fleet would not be back in time, and not for mercy, because there was precious little of that- but wait for sleep, which walked hand-in-hand with death.

* * *

When the fleet returned to New Caprica, the first thing they found was empty space surrounding the planet.

The second thing they found was the remains of a war where the settlement had been. In the spring mud lay the corpses of the colonists, the bodies finally thawing after their long winter hibernation.

"Gods," Lee muttered, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve after losing his breakfast, still looking mildly green. Adama didn't see any shame in the action; he felt sick himself. "Where are their wounds?" Lee asked. "Did they all just keel over at once?"

A nearby fleet member shook his head. He had been a family-practitioner before the nuclear holocaust, and thereafter spent much of his time patching up bullet holes and examining expectant mothers- the most precious resource of the remaining human race, and a surprisingly slim one, at that. "Winter deaths," he murmured, "colds, flu, whatever nasty viruses pop up in crowded communities with bad conditions. The ground was probably too hard to dig proper graves."

Adama felt a cold knot form at the base of his spine, wondering if there were survivors, and where they were, and whether one the corpses surrounding him had previously answered to the name "Laura."

He turned to see the entire group of fleet and crew members waiting for orders with anxious expressions. "Spread out," he heard himself say, "and check for any survivors."

From the looks on their faces, they knew just as well as he that if anyone was still alive from the settlement, they were no longer there. No one in his or her right mind would continue to live in this sprawling mass grave.

"And don't drink the water," he added, noting that several of the crowd were beginning to look nauseous once again.

Lee seemed to be intently watching the tree line. He had a hand tucked deep into a pocket, the other resting lightly on his weapon. Adama realized that his son was probably looking for Starbuck, waiting for the moment when she would step out of the forest with a smart-ass comment and a rough slap on the back.

Adama's own list of people to look for included the same blonde trouble maker, and extended to Saul, the former president, and the current one, if only so that he could strangle Gaius Baltar with his bare hands for being an incompetent idiot. He then had plans to drag Laura Roslin aboard a Viper, take her to Galactica, and make her eat a proper meal. He only hoped that she had the decency to still be alive.

He looked around him again as his crew split into groups and headed into different directions, all trying to weave around the corpses. It was amazing how many people had once thrived in this small settlement… and even more amazing how many bodies the surface mud cradled.

He set out for the forest, not protesting when Lee fell into step beside him.

They were looking for the same people, anyway.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep," Lee muttered as they took their first steps into the forest, feeling their boots sink into the thick morass of mud and bracken. "Which way?"

"I didn't spend much time here," Adama said by way of a reply, "but there should still be a major water source about sixty meters ahead. It's upstream from the camp and should be untainted."

"They might have settled there, then… they wouldn't have wanted to go too far in case we came back."

_In case_ they came back. _If_ there were any settlers left.

Adama's hopes were not very high.

This perspective seemed justified when they found the water source completely deserted, as well as flooded from mountain snow-melt. Another nearby spring was found in a similar condition, and following the creek yielded no more evidence of human life than hunting traps several months old, judging by the deteriorating corpses of the animals caught in the sprung traps.

Then they heard the distinctive wail of a human infant.

It was hard to say who was more surprised when the pair finally burst into the small clearing, only to be faced with the unlikely sight of Starbuck stirring a cooking pot wearing a long, ragged dress, her hair tumbling down her back, and a baby perched on her hip.

To be clear: _she_ looked merely annoyed. It was the men who found her new image hard to process.

Lee seemed to take it particularly hard. "Dear gods, you're wearing a _dress_."

She didn't have a free hand, which explained why she didn't hurl anything at his head. "It took you long enough," she snapped, and shook a warning finger at them. "Don't move. I'll be right back."

As she disappeared into the woods behind her, Lee shook his head, a bit dazed. "Was she carrying a baby?"

If the situation back at the original settlement had been any less grim, Bill would have considered explaining the birds and the bees to his son. He restrained himself, remembering that the body of Samuel Anders had been laid out near their entrance to the forest.

Starbuck reappeared, followed by Tyrol and Cally. The small group exchanged measuring glances as Adama felt deep disappointment weigh in his mind.

"Only four?" he asked, eyes glancing at the smiling baby on Starbuck's hip. Four out of too many, four out of nearly _forty thousand_. The idea was staggering

"No," Tyrol answered. "Several thousand, including nearly a thousand children and pregnant women." He paused. "The winter went poorly, even more so after the Cylons left with their supplies."

'Poorly' wasn't the term Adama would have used. "Where is the remainder of the population?" Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lee hesitantly approaching Kara.

"There is a large meadow a half a kilometer from here, with another water source. The majority settled there, with the rest spread out between this clearing and there." Tyrol hesitated, and glanced at Cally, who nodded slightly. "Admiral, I am sorry to inform you of the death of Colonel Tigh." He took a breath. "And sorrier to inform you that Mrs. Tigh survived her husband," he added in a rush.

That it was a blow was hardly surprising. That a flash of red hair seen out of the corner of his eye seemed to temporarily deflect the grief _was_ rather surprising.

He turned slightly toward the quick glimpse, and met her eyes. He hadn't a clue how to act, and judging from her expression, she didn't either. The dignity of their respective stations (because lost election or no, she was still a public figure) prohibited a desperate clinch, but after walking through the battlefield that was the settlement, he wasn't satisfied with a handshake and a simple greeting.

After another moment of consideration, he threw caution to the wind and stepped forward, pulling Laura Roslin into an embrace that any reporters still living probably sensed from kilometers away. Judging by the way her arms curled around his neck, he doubted that she minded his abruptness, and when she lifted her lips to his, he knew for certain.

Behind them, he dimly heard Starbuck and Lee's hissed conversation sputter into sudden silence.

Starbuck's wit seemed to overcome her shock. "I think they'll be doing that a lot in the future," she commented wickedly to Lee in an undertone.

Bill pulled away from Laura, his hands resting on her hips, and looked from her bittersweet satisfied smile to his son's shocked expression. "Go and collect the fleet." He glanced toward Tyrol. "Make an announcement to the remaining populace that we have arrived. I want everyone off this planet as soon as possible."

As they left to follow orders, followed by Starbuck and Cally, he met Laura's gaze again. "Before you ask," she informed him dryly, "_I_ am the president."

"Does that mean I have been denied the pleasure of introducing Baltar to my fist?"

"Yes, but seeing as he is currently the only human being among the Cylon population, I think you can rest easy that he has gotten his reward."

It was a very satisfying scenario.

She frowned slightly. "I'm very sorry about Colonel Tigh. He was involved in a rebellion that ended badly."

In Bill's opinion, most rebellions ended badly. At the moment, the news was sorrowful, but not incapacitating: he had not been a soldier for so long without knowing how to handle the death of a friend in combat. Later, he would grieve, when the remaining colonists were finally settled and safely away from New Caprica.

Until then, he could only concentrate on so many emotions at one time. Relief was high on the list.

"Do you have anything to pack?" he asked quietly, releasing her hips and taking her arm. She nodded, a lock of her long hair falling in front of her eyes.

As they moved forward into the trees, she stepped on a branch and stumbled slightly. He gave her a concerned glance, wondering at her tight grasp on his arm and the sudden pallor to her face.

"Snow," she said, as if that were the answer to his unspoken question, and shook her head impatiently as if the action would drive unwanted associations out of her mind.

He thought it a strange answer, but a moment of thought brought him the obvious explanation.

"I miss the halls of Galactica," she said quietly, stepping on another branch and swallowing audibly. "They're so clear."

He couldn't wait to leave the woods.

1/1


	2. Every Knot Was Once Straight Rope

AN: Sequel to Into the Woods. Very AU.

***

They were at the point between public approval and condemnation, the point between utter, frantic relief and the mellowing of lust into deeper, sustaining affection, and perfectly at the point where sharing quarters was both comfortable and delightfully new. For him, the mere sight of her fingers brushing over the spines of his books with perfect ease meant a missed heartbeat; for her, the feel of his pillow under her cheek and his chest against her back was the return of a normal they had never before experienced.

They were different people, but in name still the same: the Admiral and his President. The lines between democracy and military rule might have blurred, somewhat, but the melding of two ways of life was tempered by deeper understanding of each other and the society they were building. She knew, now, that a particular tilt of his head was a silent request for an interruption in his work, but that the same tilt in the opposite direction was a warning signal that even she best tread softly, both literally and figuratively.

He knew that a particular far-off look in her eyes could mean a variety of things: if she was curled up on their couch, legs tucked beneath her, she would welcome an embrace, but if her hand was tucked beneath her chin and her feet were firmly on the ground, then it was not his touch that she wanted but his mind. He had seen the look post-coitus and during her early morning ablutions.

And sometimes, he saw the look combined with the slightest hesitation in her step, and knew that she was unconsciously preparing herself for the moment when foot hit ground, when she might find that steel halls had melted away into snowy fields, where a branch might not be a branch.

New Caprica had not been kind to Laura Roslin, no more than it had been kind to Kara Thrace, or Ellen Tigh, or any one of the pitifully few still-living refugees. When he had returned to her the whiteboard, she had stared for a few moments at the number last written on it- 39,799- before dragging her hand across the numerals and marking in four of her own.

8,893.

There was one blessing, besides the obvious improvement in their relationship: a rash of pregnancies seemed to sweep across the fleet, as more and more people realized exactly how low the population had dipped. It was the emptiness that drove the point home, as civilians and crew alike began to find that an empty room was more likely to bring back the ghosts of the settlement than anything else.

There were many empty rooms, just as there seemed to be many dimly echoing hallways. The sound of one set of footsteps had never seemed quite so ominous; where once people complained about the crowding, now they longed for and tried to reproduce it. Extended families and close friends found themselves moving closer; pilots and crewmembers began moving into empty racks in rooms half-filled. The noise was encouraging. The sound of a child's laughter or a baby's cry became dear in a way that it had never been before.

Laura wanted some of that sound in her own life, as well as in her quarters. But her time for children had passed, and if Lee was fathering any grandchildren he had yet to present one to her or his father for dandling and cuddling. She could appease a certain amount of her longing during the day, when she found herself stealing moments to check in on the women with infants, or the small classrooms filled with children and teenagers. She found the presence of the teenagers nearly as heartbreaking as she found the infants, but in quite a different way: for them, the classroom was a mere formality, a grasping a hold of what was formerly normal. They had known too much of suffering on New Caprica to continue in this stage between childhood and adulthood. Gangly and self-conscious, they jumped at unexpected sounds and were more starved for touch than the normal toddler. More than one child was born from children as girl and boy paired off, and within the stricter religious sects, where sex was meant for the marriage bed, there came a bending of rules and a softening of temper born from piety.

There were, however, girls from that age group who broke the mold by turning so deeply averse to touch that socialization seemed to be the last thing they wanted, even with each other. They were not the only females who suddenly became this way; Laura knew several formerly vibrant women who had become shadows of their former selves.

All of childbearing age. All unnaturally barren.

The farms of Kara's memory were gentle and kind compared to the experiments performed as snow fell onto snow on New Caprica.

All this Laura inherited with her office. Each time she entered and exited her quarters shared with Bill, she experienced a new paradigm shift. The small set of rooms was home and warm and just the right amount of crowded, while the halls outside were bare and quiet and nearly as cold as the snow she still remembered. Had she once really wished for this clarity? She preferred the veil that the light from shaded lamps drew over her raw memories; she preferred his warm embrace over watching the barren girls weep and shrink from her touch. She preferred studying his habits so minutely that she could distract herself with recounting them whenever she saw Lee and Kara catch glimpse of each other and turn before meeting, the presence of Kara's child and Kara's grief insurmountable now that they had left the hostile planet in favor of familiar halls.

For Bill, who had long grown accustomed to empty hallways and quiet rooms, his greatest distress came in watching how the changes affected Laura, recognizing that her empty arms could not quite be filled by his frame.

But then, he thought ruefully, the same could be said of him.


End file.
